Five reasons not to worry about ethics and violence in video games as adults.
Either you are spending a Friday night playing some gory ‘Mortal Kombat’, or just feel like pick pocketing in ‘Assassin’s creed’ and have that buzzing voice at the back of your head questioning your morals and asking how the playful times you are enjoying might interpret in your real life and end up with you pulling someone’s spine out of their throat…
Uh-oh, well you see, the fact that the very sentence is shocking means you are far away from doing it in real life…. hopefully.
The process of decision making:
From the moment the thought crosses your mind until you finally make the decision you go through a process that is surprisingly called “decision making”. Just like dwelling on the thought of that bag of chips for 30 minutes until you finally grab it and shove the first handful in your mouth, or if you are me, you go for the baby carrots and hummus… just joking, definitely chips.
So a thought comes up in your mind, like punching, and your mind starts gathering evidence and data in accord with the initial decision. what is it that you are thinking about punching? which hand are you going to use? How strongly are you going to punch? What color should the curtains be? (for the sake of the human factor).
Now you have made the decision based on as much data as you have processed, there is not really a set time that you make the decision for you can spend an eternity gathering information and never really call it “enough”.
You are playing a fighting game like ‘Tekken’ or ‘Mortal Kombat’ and you come to the point of making a decision of making the next move. Your brain (which is the most powerful super computer you have ever come across) goes through the data quickly and recognizes that you are playing a digital, physically non existent character on a platform that is made of ones and zeros, punching another piece of codes (Unless you want to argue the existential part that we are all really just codes and reality is an illusion, I don’t see why this model wouldn’t make sense otherwise). Your subconscious recognizes the situation as safe and based on the dynamics of the game rewarding to trigger the choice of pressing the button that will result in the illustration of a punch in the video game (you see you are not even punching). In a real life situation the data, evidence and the decision making process that we go through is of a completely different nature and with a healthy sense of right and wrong and orientation we can make the right choice for the situation, and funnily the right choice might be punching, just like when you are in front of a punching bag.
If video games can cause violent behavior then what about martial arts?
As a martial arts enthusiast spending five years in rings punching and getting punched and having hundreds of sores and bruises, I have a hard time vacuuming over an insect on the carpet. Just like the previous example, this gives us an insight about how set and settings is what that makes the decision reach its Action point. Martial artists are even known for their calm minds, sportsmanship, and strong moral and discipline.
Having that noted down enlightens the idea that the intellect goes through a different process in different life situations, in martial arts you are actively engaging in a “fight” if you want to look at it that way, I would say, it is more of a “game” or a “dance” than a fight. Even though you are kicking someone in the stomach, you have no intentions of actually hurting them in a way that reduces their dignity and quality of life. It is a consensual, mutual exploration of our mental and physical limits, just like video games, when you punch a friend’s representing character you are not meaning to harm them outside the screen.
I am worried about those who never express anger, not those who take the time to vent.
Seriously, you might have a distant desire to experience the adrenaline rush of assassinating that merchant, or looting one of those big box stores and get all the peanut butter you need for the rest of your life. Why not play some ‘Grand Thief Auto’ and give yourself space to explore the mental stimulation of stealing a car than doing it in real life? We all need a sandbox don’t we. I believe it is much healthier to let these thoughts and desires surface in a safe, harmless way, and observed and played with than repressing them to a point of desperation that can ultimately lead to the crime scene that we are observing today. The courts are filled with people who were arrested for really stealing someones bags and diamonds, not those who looted their enemies dead bodies in ‘Dragon Age’. Look at it the same way you look at the good old game ‘tag ’, no ‘it’ really wants to get those who are chased and eat them, they’ll just switch roles once the chaser tags the chased.
You can’t teach an old dog a new trick.
The age requirements for video games are there to keep vulnerable brains from observing their possibly misleading depictions. By the time you have reached the age to play certain video games, your behavioral patterns are already solid enough for you to explore areas of further curiosity and interest. In this blog we are specifically talking about adults. After years of learned moral, ethics, and the ways of responding to the environment adults come to the video games with a certain sense of good and bad, they can discuss how they approve and disapprove certain behaviors in video games, they can analyse and actively participate in the process of taking in information and sorting input (As a matter of fact, they can write articles like this). Whereas for a child or a human being in a window of time that might be more influenced by environmental input and does not yet have a strict or clear enough understanding on who they would react to a wide enough variety of situations, things might be different. And let’s remember that anything from orange juice to video games can be liberally enjoyed to the level of subjective moderation and personal states of healthy satisfaction.
To know what we do not want is equally as important as knowing what we want.
Just the same way a sculptor removes stone to bring the final form out, or a wood carver carves wood, we need to have a clear sense of what we do not want in our lives to be able to truly carve our real life behavior the way we want it to be. Having said that, we can even argue that playing a gory game, or picking up what is not yours in a game can show you what it is that you don’t really desire. We might even get a better sense of what harmful, violent, or destructive behavior looks like and avoid it in real life situations.
Just as saying No is a valuable life skill and knowing what you need to say No to is an integral part of it, understanding what you want to stay away from and getting a good feel of it could be beneficial to your moral and decision making processes. Thing about all the movies, books, and media that educate us by beautifully depicting racism, sexism and deeper social dilemmas. No one worries to become racist because they watched a movie that depicted racism, they might even get their eyes opened to these issues and have a clearer vision of how they want to handle them out there when they come across it.
we all sometimes need to just crack open a favorite drink, get some delicious snacks and step out of our ‘be good, be nice’ shoes and get on the couch and enjoy some play time. trust me, you will go back to work a better person. And once that office coffee machine doesn’t work, you are relaxed as a swan on a lake for you have punched and slayed all your enemies last night, going to sleep with all your deepest frustrations and conflicts already vented.
